HENRY ROLLINS EDITORIAL IN VANITY FAIR - WE'RE GONNA HAVE A TEA PARTY TONIGHT!

Vanity Fair -- The head spins. This will take days to filter. Days? Weeks, months even. There’s Tom Tancredo’s recent baby’s-up-past-bedtime blather at a Tea Party event about the “cult of multiculturalism”—wow! Mr. T, do you really want to have a literacy test for voters? Think if they had one when you ran for office that you would have been elected? Oliver North’s melding of homosexuality and pedophilia on Fox News when he flexed his mini-mind and ranted paranoid on the topic of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—righteous! Ollie, you need better makeup to hide the gills on your neck! Don’t Ask Oliver North where he can get one solid fact to back up his bizarre assertions. Don’t Tell the shamed ex-Marine that the military already has thousands of brave homosexual men and women serving their country and defending the Constitution, who would never think of behaving as he did back in the Iran-Contra days. Then again, why bother with Lieutenant Colonel North? He’s an irrelevant relic of the failed Reagan administration.

Then there’s Sarah Palin, who, egged on by other intellectually malnourished “real Americans,” has said so many startlingly stupid things in the last few days, the comedic furnaces won’t be cooling down any time soon! She’s a dynamo of dumbassity! An inferno of idiocy! Yes, Ms. Palin, 2012 is almost in your grasp! Reach for the stars, get a map, find Iran, start another pointless war we can’t afford! Score!

Just when America really needs to get to work and move forward, some of the dimmest bulbs in the country decide it’s time to turn on and lead the race to the bottom. Christian groups freaked out by the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and its threat to their religious freedom to hate homosexuals—don’t worry, homophobes! The First Amendment protects your right to tell the world that gays are hell-bound! No one’s trying to impose a “homosexual agenda” on you! The rest of us are just trying to impose some much-needed decency and cultural evolution. I know, I know, fear the change, fear the equality, progress, blahblahblah …

You silly grown-ups! The future is hilarious and very problematic, thanks to you. Cheer up! I’ll do my best to track your epic, very public nosedive.